Le Mague was launched at a time when social media didn’t really exist yet, when people spoke of ‘websites’ as if they were still somewhat of a strange new territory, and when publishing online was almost a craft. Since then, everything has changed. The tools, the habits, Google, mobile phones, social media, the way we read, watch, share and stay informed. Le Mague, too, has changed a thousand times over. It has seen very busy periods and quieter ones, successes and failures, slumps, changes of direction, technical glitches and probably a few editorial decisions best forgotten.
But it’s still here.
And ultimately, perhaps that is what makes its current progress particularly pleasing. It isn’t the result of launching a new media outlet with a marketing plan, investors, an army of PR people and an Excel spreadsheet forecasting five-year growth. It comes after twenty-three years of tinkering, passion, articles written simply because we fancied writing them, encounters, interviews, photos, films, rants, curiosity and, above all, a certain loyalty to a very simple idea: to publish what we find interesting.
Seeing several hundred thousand visits piling up every month today obviously brings a smile to our faces. It would be hypocritical to claim otherwise. When we write, photograph, film or publish something, we generally prefer it to be seen rather than disappear into a corner of the web all on its own. Behind an audience trend, there are, above all, people. People who arrived via a Google search, a link sent by a friend, an article shared somewhere, and who sometimes stay, read something else and come back a few days later.
It is this aspect that matters most.
Because an audience is not just a statistic displayed in an admin interface. Ten thousand visits in a day mean ten thousand visits, ten thousand instances of curiosity, ten thousand opportunities for a piece of writing to reach someone. And when this audience grows gradually, it may simply mean that a media outlet twenty-three years old can still find new readers.
It would be tempting to call this a renaissance. The word would no doubt be a little excessive. Let’s call it a new era instead. A new energy. There is a very clear sense that, having weathered several generations of the internet, Le Mague is beginning another chapter in its history.
The website is evolving; its layout is changing; images are taking up more space; topics are becoming more diverse; and video and visual content are gradually finding their place. Technology is changing too. Artificial intelligence is already revolutionising the way we produce, search for and discover information. It would be absurd for a media outlet that has weathered twenty-three years of digital revolution to suddenly decide that the world must stop moving.
So we carry on.
With, no doubt, plenty of room for improvement. With glitches. With some ideas that will work and others that will work far less well. With a few serious articles, others of a lighter nature, discoveries, images, voices, contrasting perspectives and that editorial freedom which has always been one of the reasons for Le Mague’s existence.
So there’ll be no champagne corks popping over a rising graph. Not yet, anyway. But we do have the right to gaze for a few seconds at that climbing green curve and tell ourselves that, ultimately, twenty-three years on, the story is still going rather well.
And to feel a little proud of it. Not proud of having ‘made it’. Proud of still being here.
